Ramseyer-Northern Bible Society Collection

The
Vulgate

As the Christian Church formed an organization in the early centuries of
the Christian era, the question of an agreed-upon canon and text for the Bible
became paramount. This task fell to Saint Jerome, in the late 4th century
CE. He was well versed in Hebrew, Greek and Latin and produced a version of
both Old and New Testaments in Latin, that being the lingua franca of the
Church in that day. This became known as The Vulgate, meaning the vulgar,
or common, tongue version and it remained the basic Bible for the Church for
many centuries. It was the Bible read and used in the churches, except that
a variant translation of the Psalms was incorporated into the Roman Psalter
for liturgical purposes.

The Vulgate was the form in which the first printing of the Bible was done
in 1453-56 by Johann Gutenberg. Previous to that time all copies of the Bible
had been written by hand, usually in the Gothic-style heavy-down-stroke hand-writing,
and the scribes had used frequent abbreviations to save costly parchment.
These aspects of writing were at first copied by printers, which makes for
difficult reading quite apart from knowing the Latin language, but obviously
it was assumed that the reader already knew much of the Bible by heart, and
was using the text as a reminder rather than totally as a source.